


Hard-Working

by Jenett



Series: Hufflepuff Virtues [1]
Category: Alternity - A Harry Potter Alternate Universe, Harry Potter Alternity - Fandom
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Harry Potter - Alternity, Hufflepuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-13
Updated: 2015-09-13
Packaged: 2018-04-20 14:55:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4791479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jenett/pseuds/Jenett
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written as background fic for the <a href="http://hpalternity.com">Harry Potter Alternity project</a>.</p><p>Part of three stories exploring internal character thoughts for Aurora Sinistra during Year 4, thematically centered on three Hufflepuff virtues, as she tries to figure out what the implications of her relationship with Rabastan Lestrange (Raz) and the circles he moves in.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hard-Working

**Author's Note:**

> The specific larger events mentioned are part of Alternity’s canon and discussed with the other relevant players, but her reactions and opinions are decidedly hers and not necessarily canon for the universe.

**March 31st, 1995 : Her Rooms : Hogwarts**

_Labor omnia vicit improbu_ (Relentless work conquers all)  
Virgil :  Georgics

The failure mode of Hufflepuff is work.

She’s known this for decades.

Known it since she saw her mother work to near catastrophe while carrying Theo, her grief at her own mother’s death overwhelming every bit of sense and logic. Known it since she came home for an unexpected visit from Wales, and realised her father’s late nights at the office hid something deeply wrong in his body he was terrified to admit. Known it in Dai’s stubbornness, insisting on doing for himself, not accepting the smallest help from her. From anyone.

And she knows it now, standing in her rooms, looking at herself in the mirror after another long, hopeless night.

Work is the mirror and the smoke. If you have to, you can bury almost anything in the need to work and in the results of that work.

Other people, from other houses, don’t get this.

For that matter, at least half of Hufflepuff doesn’t understand it either, the ones for whom inclusion, fairness, justice, or friendship were the password to all the gold and black of the sett. It has them, in their blood, though. Inclusion and fairness and friendship and justice have their failure modes as well, but there’s none so innately self-destructive as the deep heartbeat call to work the pain away.

But there’s that thread, that certain strand of the House, that acknowledges that beat, that call, that imperative. They know each other, when they cross paths.

They are the ones who take the extra time over their notes not for brilliance but for clarity and for ease later. The ones who stay after a meeting to make sure everything is settled and noted and filed. They are the Healers - like her cousin Mel - known for their unstinting devotion to patient care when all hope seems lost. The ones who work through the weekend, through the night, to finish a project when no one else will, because the result is some small improvement in the world.

The ones for whom work is the password and the calling - and the seduction - are not always easy to spot. Not for them the multi-colored inks and meticulous notes of some Ravenclaws, who work for knowledge, for brillance, for illumination. Nor the intricate webs of social connection and paths to power of the Slytherins, who work for leverage, for the discovery of the pivot from which they can move the world. And certainly not the twist of luck and courage and sheer brazen daringness of Gryffindors, who work, yes, but whose work is a haphazard thing, woven between the passions of the world.

No.

You find them, the workers, in quiet places, doing the needful thing. The corner of a cafe, near closing. The back of the library, not the showy table of the Ravenclaw Corner. At their own desk, everything laid out at hand, in the personal pattern that suits them best, honed from their earliest days. They are the ones who make space in a crowded day for one more project, one more conversation, one more moment.

A glance at her desk reminds her of the anchor she’s shaped as long as she can remember. From her first desk, in the room she shared with Diane, through her dorm rooms at school, to the cramped quarters at Alde’s and the more spacious temporary ones of her research projects. And then here.

She knows, without needing to look, where every tool is. Astrolabe at hand on that shelf. Astronomical atlas there. Quill and ink - charmed to not smudge with her lefthandedness - in just the perfect place. Graphite and erasers, charts and parchment, quill knife and blotting paper. She could find her tools in the dark, and has, some nights, when waking and laying her hand on the tools of her trade has been the thing that finally reassures her she is no longer tangled in nightmare.

It is not because she is meticulous, though she keeps her rooms tidy enough. It is because it is efficient, effective. If her things are there, in their place and orbit, she can work that much faster, that much more sure and certain. She knows her place among them, and the weight of the tool she is and has become.

She looks back at the mirror.

How does she explain this? That the work, right now, is not sickness but symptom? That she sees the worry in his eyes, but has no idea how to let it go.

It is not the work that is the problem, after all. It is the flood that the work is holding back. The things that she is burying in effort, indetail, in long lists and careful parchments.

It’s not that they’re not needed - her conscience, her soul, will not let her linger long at useless tasks. And she’d admit, if someone pressed, that these things did not, perhaps, need to happen this week, this month. Even this year. (We have lived without a commentary on changes in Alde’s charts for this long. The world can survive a while longer without them.)

But still. There’s the beat of the work in her veins, and curled through her dreams, in between the nightmares. The solace and the comfort she finds in knowing where to turn her hand, direct her attention, drown her fear.

And it’s that needfulness that keeps her chained. 

For him, it’s so easy: you are working too much, put something down.

It doesn’t work like that - can’t work like that - inside her head.

For each time she skittishly considers it, her brain insists on showing her the patterns and the holes each change would form. She can’t help it.

Put down the YPL duties here, and she flashes to that awful moment in the interview waiting room at the Ministry when she realised just how destructive the other candidates would be for her students. Crushing spirit and initiative, and the chances for so many of them to find their own work, their own solace and skill.

Put down the Astronomy, then, comes Raz’s patient voice in her head. The answer there is faster, violent even. Let someone else in her Tower? The one she promised Alcor she’d tend and nurture?

Alcor did not get the work. He never had, never understood all of the passion that drove her up to the top of the stairs night after night even while he used it to bribe and guide her to his own goals. (Some of it, yes, but not all.) But he did understand possession. And protection, and holding your territory.

Part of her work is atonement to his memory, of wondering what might have happened had she made some other answer in that inquiry after his retirement. And it’s knowing the other possibilities, who again, would care less for students, for learning, for understanding, than she does. Most of them, anyway.

And then there’s the unspoken work, the expectations that drift around her ears and eddy in every social event she’s been to the last few months. That it is the responsibility of pureblood witches to have and raise more children, for the glory of the Protectorate. Of how much more insistent the pamphlets and letters have gotten, from the Ministry, from her family. The rough and blunt hints from yearmates when she bumps into them, a few of whom have children due to begin learning here, sooner than later.

And so, she finds herself, still, in front of the mirror.

No. The work remains. But perhaps, somehow, she can find a way to let some of what it’s hiding, what it’s covering, go. Find some way to refine and narrow the scope of the work to what is most essential, most needed. Most helpful and important.

She turns, then. To walk down, away from her tower, into the arms of someone who might just now be coming to figure out his work, so different and strange from the choices others forced him to.

And perhaps, just perhaps, she will find the words that untangle work from fear, work from numbness, work from loss of innocence. Back into the place where work is salvation and light and wholeness, the stars in their progression and the planets in their orbits, and all right with the world.


End file.
